“Could one reason behind the lack of excitement be that one of its main stars, Portia de Rossi, is practically unrecognizable?” wrote Nina Strocholic from The Daily Beast when addressing the fourth season of Arrested Development. On Memorial Day, the popular series returned after seven years of rest, releasing an entire season (15 episodes worth) all at once on Netflix. This is how the running-joke-heavy-sitcom was meant to be watched: all in one sitting, over and over again, at the viewers own leisure.

But it seemed that all the Twittersphere could talk about on Monday was actress Portia de Rossi’s face. De Rossi, who plays the vapid, self-centered, clueless Lindsay Bluth-Fünke in the series, had apparently had some work done — and this was not cool with viewers. The shock of de Rossi’s “new face” was practically being viewed as a continuity error on the show.

There is a very specific type of pressure we put on the females of Hollywood – for de Rossi, now 40, the pressure is no longer just to be thin and beautiful, but to be young

“Was I the only one who spent the first two minutes of that episode Googling whether that was actually Portia de Rossi playing Lindsay Bluth?” one befuddled fan wondered.

“It may be something with the wig she is wearing (maybe it pulls at her face?) and her weird makeup.” another fan wrote.

“I hate to be a hater, but Portia de Rossi looks more like Calista Flockhart than Lindsay Bluth now, with her face-lift and all #bummer,” one journalist wrote onTwitter.

“So is no one going to address the fact that Lindsay Funke [sic] completely changed her face in a matter of minutes?’ another tweeter asked.

(Lindsay Bluth-Fünke is a fictional character, FYI.)

To add expert insult to injury, The Hollywood Life gathered four plastic surgeons to speculate on what the actress and wife of Ellen Degeneres could have had done. “It appears that Portia underwent nasal tip reconstruction … She also may have had blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery) … She definitely appears to have Botox injections …” Yes, and Amanda Bynes threw her bong out a window and Lindsay Lohan is in rehab for the 8 millionth time and Kim Kardashian is gaining pregnancy weight.

In her New York Times Best Selling book Unbearable Lightness, de Rossi wrote about her nearly decades-long battle with anorexia, bulimia and her sexual orientation (it took her a very long time to come out as a lesbian), concluding that she exuded so much energy worrying about public judgment that she held herself back.

“By starving myself into society’s beauty ideal, I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life,” De Rossi wrote. “Being overweight was really no different. It was just the ‘f–k you’ response to the same pressure. I was still responding to the pressure to comply to the fashion industry’s standards of beauty, just in the negative sense. I was still answering to their demands when really I shouldn’t have been listening to them at all. The images of stick-thin prepubescent girls never should have had power over me. I should’ve had my sights set on successful businesswomen and successful female artists, authors, and politicians to emulate. Instead I stupidly and pointlessly just wanted to be considered pretty. I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference.”

There is a very specific type of pressure we put on the females of Hollywood – for de Rossi, now 40, the pressure is no longer just to be thin and beautiful, but to be young. By giving herself up to the public eye of the red carpet, de Rossi struggles with having foregone the right to exist in a world that asks her to do anything but worry about her appearance while simultaneously being ripped apart for doing so. But imagine the actress had let herself age naturally? Damned if you do, Portia …

Imagine the actress had let herself age naturally? Damned if you do, Portia

So why is this not the conversation we’re having about de Rossi’s surgery? An an actress who has once spoken openly about her struggle to achieve an untenable beauty ideal, should we not instead be criticising the culture that may have led de Rossi to succumb to the pressure of surgically maintaining her youth — if we’re going to criticize anything at all? Assembling a crack team of cosmetic surgeons to publicly scrutinize an actress’ appearance is solving the problem of “what” (as if that was a problem) but not “why.” (In fact, it kind of is the “why.”)

But also, at the end of the day, so what? So what if she underwent some plastic surgery? Some lunch time Botox? Isn’t this a big, giant gulp of “who hasn’t?” when it comes to Hollywood life? When I interviewed Joan Rivers a few years ago, she told me that if plastic surgery is going to make you feel better, more secure, about yourself, “run, don’t walk” to that doctor’s appointment. Yes, it might be considered sad that anyone would succumb to the pressures of the world’s unrealistic beauty standards, but all those judgmental tweets are just fuelling the fire. We have no idea what it is like to have our alleged new nose be a trending topic.

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